I don't have a baseline (though can think of a few places I might look...)[1], but I do have some recent data based on a project I've been working on.

There's a simplified page for CNN news at <https://lite.cnn.com>.

I've found that frustrating as all the stories are jumbled together with little rhyme or reason (though they seem to be roughly date-ordered).

Ironically, the story URLs themselves include both date and news-section coding, as with:

https://lite.cnn.com/2024/12/28/us/patrick-thomas-egan-accused-tv-reporter-attack/index.html

That's a US story dated 2024-12-28.

It's possible to extract these and write a restructured page grouped by subject, which I've recently done. One work product is an archive of downloaded front-page views, which I've collected over about the past 5 days. Extracting unique news URLs from that and counting by classification we get a sense of what CNN considers "news":

Stories: 486
Sections: 27

76 (15.64%) US News
67 (13.79%) US Politics
9 (1.85%) World
8 (1.65%) World -- Americas
6 (1.23%) World -- Africa
15 (3.09%) World -- Asia
4 (0.82%) World -- Australia
5 (1.03%) World -- China
2 (0.41%) World -- India
37 (7.61%) World -- Europe
21 (4.32%) World -- MidEast
2 (0.41%) World -- UK
8 (1.65%) Economy
45 (9.26%) Business
4 (0.82%) Tech
3 (0.62%) Investing
8 (1.65%) Media
8 (1.65%) Science
7 (1.44%) Weather
4 (0.82%) Climate
22 (4.53%) Health
2 (0.41%) Food
1 (0.21%) Homes
39 (8.02%) Entertainment
52 (10.70%) Sport
22 (4.53%) Travel
9 (1.85%) Style

The ordering here is how I display sections within the rendered page, by my own assigned significance.

One element which had inspired this was that so much of CNN's "news" seemed entertainment-related. That's not just "Entertainment", but also much of Health, Food, Homes, Sport, Travel, and Style, which are collectively 147 of 486 stories, or about 1/3 of the total.

Further, much if not most of the "US-News" category is ... relatively mundane crime coverage. It's attention-grabbing, but not particularly significant. Stories in other sections (politics, business, investing, media) can also be markedly trivial.

Ballparking half of US news as non-trivial crime, at best about 60% of the headlines are what I'd consider to be actual journalistic news, and probably less than that.

On the one hand, I now have a tool which gives me a far more organised view of CNN headlines. On the other ... the actual content isn't especially significant.

I'm looking at similar tools for other news sites, though I'm limited to those which will serve JS-free content. Many sites have exceedingly complex page layouts, and some (e.g., the Financial Times don't encode date or section clearly in the story URLs themselves, e.g.:

https://www.ft.com/content/d85f3f2d-9e9d-4d92-a851-64480e56a248

That's a presently current story "Putin apologises to Azerbaijan for Kazakhstan air crash", classified as "Aviation accidents and safety".

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Notes:

1. For those interested, most readily accessed and parsed, the Vanderbilt TV News Archive (<https://tvnews.vanderbilt.edu/>), which has rundowns of US natinoal news beginning 5 August 1968, to present (ABC, CBS, and NBC from inception, with CNN since 1995 and Fox News since 2004). It's not the most rigorous archive, but it's one that could probably be analysed more reasonably than others.